Businesses or other entities may benefit from locating near each other within a building or on a floor. In many cases, common infrastructure and equipment may be shared. If the operations of the two entities are similar, workspace as well as employees may be shifted from one entity to another as an enterprise grows, declines or changes focus. This strategy allows a growing business to adapt to changes with minimal effort and expense. For a business that is temporarily declining, it may preserve a cadre of trained employees who may be shifted back as the business recovers.
For any group of entities, some pairs will be better-matched than others for co-location. Conventionally, planners make decisions regarding co-location based on a personal assessment. Typically, only a small set of criteria are considered and the criteria may not be the same in every case.
There is no known approach that evaluates candidates for co-location using an unbiased mathematical framework. An electronic system could quickly reduce a broad set of criteria to mathematical terms for processing to assess suitability for co-location. Moreover, an electronic system could evaluate a group of entities together, assessing each paring in a consistent way and producing quantified results.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide apparatus and methods for electronically evaluating a pair of entities as candidates for co-location.